Elsewhat

This is a bit of a touchy subject, but one that is important to discuss, especially considering the disastrous results of the recent U.S. election. Media analysis show On The Media reran an episode of theirs entitled ‘Why Men and Boys are Struggling‘, which features an interview between host Micah Loewinger and author Richard Reeves:

Micah Loewinger: You write about how many advised you against writing this book. I also want to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance of the thesis and the book that some listeners might identify, which is that men and boys are struggling at a time when men still very much run our society. There are many ways you could quantify this. There are three times as many men in Congress than women, less than 10% of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women, and casual misogyny is pervasive throughout our culture.

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Richard Reeves: The way you ask the question depends on where you look. If you look at the apex of our society, it’s absolutely true that there’s still a long way to go. I would say, especially in the US in terms of female representation in politics, for example, and in boardrooms and in other areas of society.

If we look further down, then we see a very, very different picture. For working-class men, for black boys and men, those with less economic power, there’s a very different story. It can simultaneously be true that men at the top of the distribution are doing better on many fronts, including in terms of earnings. It can also be true that most American men are earning less today than most American men did in 1979. This is very much a class and a race story.

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In 1972 when Title IX was passed to support women and girls in education, men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a four-year college degree. Today, women are 15 percentage points more likely than men to get a four-year college degree. There’s been this huge overtaking in education. We also see that in high school, where girls account for 2/3 of the top 10% of students ranked by GPA

Much like the Democrats running their recent presidential campaign on the premise that “the economy is doing great”, while ignoring the fact that most of the middle class is struggling with housing and food costs, I think these issues are important to at least address.

Listen to the whole episode →

Today I learned about the existence of oxbow lakes. These are pockets of freestanding water left over when a river meanders away, leaving an echo of the river from a previous course.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, writes an intriguing piece about plant cognition in The New York Review of Books. She writes:

Several recent books contend that the latest discoveries in plant cognition are so significant they force us to rethink our view of life itself. Depending on how you look at things, this prospect is thrilling to contemplate or nothing less than tragic.

It goes on to describe some examples of complex plant behaviour:

Plants communicate with animals as well, sometimes honestly, sometimes not. Corn plants that are being nibbled by caterpillars release chemicals that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, killing them

Read the Article Here →

A silly diversion before a very important election.

See also: Powers of Ten.

From the dearly departed XOXO festival, which I sadly was never able to attend. Erin Kissane talks about the degradation of the social internet and her own role in the remarkable Covid Tracking Project.

Randall has a way of making me think about things I never considered before. Now when I turn on the tap that provides near-infinite clean drinkable water I’ll think about how crazy it is that it just works.

A new(ish) public artwork by Spanish Artist SpY.

Here is a classic short film from one of my heroes, Scottish/Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. It’s haunting, beautiful, and was groundbreaking for 1968.

Four years earlier, in 1964, McLaren (with Grant Munro) used essentially the same technique of overlaying film to create something with the complete opposite vibe, which is one of my favourite short sequences of film, the second half of his hodgepodgey film Canon. The relevant bit starts at exactly the 4:30 mark:

The difference in these two clips shows one of my favourite aspects of McLaren’s work: his flexibility. They both use essentially the same technique in different ways to create a very different effect.

The state of news media in Canada, and elsewhere, is certainly not at a good place. Newsrooms are closing, or contracting across the country. A Canadian law designed to get social media companies to share part of their revenue with news outlets backfired spectacularly when Facebook decided to remove news outlets from all of their feeds rather than share their ample profits with them.

I would never have predicted what would happen next. Facebook banishing news made an already dire news vacuum even worse. In the small prairie city of Regina, a literal dumpster company with a penchant for sharing local news on their social media accounts has stepped into the void, and has become one of the biggest sources of local news in the city. The company has amassed tens of thousands of followers for their

In writing this post, I’ve rewritten the same basic joke about media these days being ‘trash’ or ‘a dumpster fire’ over and over, but honestly it’s more exasperating than funny.

Read More (and listen to the story in Podcast form) at Canadaland →